And Add Lightness

Unhappiness, Engineered — Follow Up

Probably coincidentally, around mid-day yesterday after my post about being unhappy with WordPress, I received another response from the “Happiness Engineer”:

Hi, Matt.

I know you had low expectations of a resolution, but I found one anyway after much digging and troubleshooting! 🙂 Hope that this will give you some peace of mind.

It was indeed not a browser issue but a long-ago feature that exists only in the WP Admin dashboard. Once upon a time, we had a feature in WordPress.com that automatically changed post formats from Standard to Image if a post only had an image and just one line of text around it. I’ll be honest — we’re not sure why that particular feature was included, and it’s not something that’s come up before (or at least, not that we’ve heard). However, I posted a request to our developers to have that feature disabled, especially since we are working on moving all functionality to the new dashboard. I don’t have any timeframe as to when that will be fixed, however.

If you want to use the workaround, it’s to use the *new* dashboard for posts that only have an image and possibly just one line of text (or no text at all). That will ensure that the post format stays as Standard. Please note that this is not a theme issue or a problem in WordPress Core, but unique to WordPress.com.

Hope that helps! Thanks for bringing this to our attention and for your patience as we worked to resolve this.

On the one hand, she confirmed what I already knew (and mentioned): it’s not a browser issue. I had planned to write posts in Chrome and IE to prove the point, so at least she saved you guys from having to read that.

But (at the risk of sounding like a completely ungrateful asshat) do you notice how it’s still my fault, my problem? Because I’m using the old dashboard, my posts get horked. Okay, fine. Never mind the new dashboard is awful and by itself is another reason to consider leaving WordPress — that’s the work around. Um, I like mine better.

Am I just being ungrateful?

I haven’t responded yet — I’m having a hard time coming up with something that isn’t sarcastic.